Whippin’ That Old T. B. · No Hard Times

Jimmie Rodgers — the "Singing Brakeman," the "Blue Yodeler," the "Father of Country Music" — recorded at the Bristol Sessions in August 1927, the field recording event organized by Ralph Peer for Victor Records in Bristol, Tennessee, that also introduced the Carter Family to the recording industry. Rodgers's initial Victor sides launched a career that would produce 111 recorded sides before tuberculosis killed him in New York City in May 1933, hours after his final session.

The blue yodel was Rodgers's most original commercial contribution. Drawing on African American blues and field hollers he had absorbed working on the railroads of Mississippi and Louisiana, he fused that material with the sentimental parlor-song and minstrel traditions of the white South and wrapped it in an Appalachian yodel derived from Swiss and Tyrolean styles already in circulation via vaudeville. "Blue Yodel #2" — recorded for Victor in 1928 — was part of the numbered blue yodel series that became the backbone of his commercial identity; the series eventually ran to thirteen numbered entries plus several untitled yodels. "The Brakeman's Blues (Yodeling the Blues Away)," the coupling on that release, reinforced the railroad identity that Rodgers cultivated across his catalog.

By 1933, tuberculosis had reduced Rodgers to a shadow of his earlier self, but he continued recording for Victor until the end. "Whippin' That Old T.B." and "No Hard Times," recorded at his final session in New York on May 17, 1933, carried the autobiographical directness that marked his best work — the first a darkly comic confrontation with the disease consuming him, the second a Depression-era reassurance shot through with characteristic ease and swing. Rodgers died two days after completing that session. His influence on every subsequent strand of American country music is without parallel.

Session details drawn in part from the Bluegrass Discography.